When you record HTTP traffic in an IBM Rational Performance Tester test, you get traffic from outside the domain of your application. In version 9.1 of Rational Performance Tester, you can choose which domain you want to include in your test. In this version, you see Select domains before the Rational Performance Tester workbench generates the test that you just recorded.

How to select domains

Example

Record an HTTP test against http://ibm.com/ through Mozilla Firefox. When you finish recording, you'll see the Domains Selection window.

Aside from IBM, you also see Mozilla and Google. Apparently, network traffic is also coming from these domains. If you want to measure response times that you would normally experience when you access ibm.com, you choose all domains. If you want to measure traffic only from specific domains, you clear the corresponding check boxes.

Suppose that you want to know the responses only from the ibm.com server and not traffic from google.com and other non-IBM traffic. In that case, you clear all check boxes except the one that says ibm.

After you run the test, the test log shows only IBM traffic.In this case, IBM United Kingdom because my proxy server’s location is somewhere in England. The parts that you excluded don’t appear in the test log. Review the following two test logs, all domains selected and only ibm.com. The test opens http://ibm.com and closes that page.

Defaults, changes, and the way back

The default is to capture traffic from all domains. Previous versions of Rational Performance Tester capture traffic from all domains.

Possibly, you don’t know yet what domains to exclude from your test run. In that case, you keep the default setting. Afterward, you can disable the domains before you run the test.

Open the test from the Navigator.

Highlight the part of the test that you want to exclude. Then, click Disable.

Press Save.

You can include all domains as the default setting. Select Select all and remember my decision. The next time that you record and generate a test, the Domains Selection doesn’t appear. After you close the browser, you run directly into the test generation.

When examining the test log of a service test in RPT with SOA extension you may notice that in the extended properties for the request there's a property that says

"Data to send before security":

Similarly, in the test log of a service test you may notice there's a "Data received after security" extended attribute for the response:

What do these properties refer to?

Data to send before security

Think of this as "Data to send before security algorithms, if any, are applied"

Let's go back to the test for this request. For demonstration purposes I added a Timestamp security algorithm to the Request stack:

In the lower left hand corner we see a pane for Stack Contents

As you can see the Initial Message is the same as the value of the extended property Data to send before security

If I wanted to see what will actually being sent at run time then I would click on the Time Stamp section of the Stack Contents

Let's go back to the test log and find the actual message, security section and all. It's in the Properties but not Extended Properties and you can see it matches the message in the screen shot above in the Test Editor

Data received after security

This is the very similar to Data to send before security but is only seen on the response side.

This is to to configure the security or processing algorithms for incoming responses. Another way of describing this is if the response is encrypted, then the extended property Data received after security is the unencrypted message

Conclusion

Hopefully you've found this useful in understanding these two extended properties and what they actually mean..